Stop Start and Reset
by l'amour-the-poet
Summary: In the same place, some other time, this is them. Chloe/Davis


_**Notes**_**:** I finished this sooner than I though. This is a 50 prompt attempt for 1sentence (theme set Epsilon). This is based on Smallville (with references to comic! Doomsday occurrences, borrows a villain by the name of Gog). AU, or is it?

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_Out of the ocean depths, soundlessly moving_

_Up from my memories disturbing and deep_

_

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_#28 – _**Fortune-**_

She doesn't attribute it to luck, when at her call he materializes out of the chaos of the explosion to help with the injured girl.

#03 _**-Young-**_

He sees her trying to help the runaway (unaware of the coldness of the homes and the danger on those streets) and he thinks that despite the strength in her, she's young and vulnerable, and he wishes he could be the one to keep her safe.

#27 _**-Hide- **_

He tells her the first time he wakes covered in blood; spills out a fear that there's darkness buried so deep he's afraid he'll never wrench it out of him; and he knows he couldn't hide anything from her if he tried.

#05 _**–Wrong- **_

When it all blows over, she thinks that it's wrong to be this easy with him even as the plastic ring feels like a lead weight on her finger.

#47 _**-Harm-**_

The strange sick need to be close to her persists knowing she's engaged, that he can't touch her; that other part of him stirs and he fears for the first time that *it* will be the harm he won't be able to protect her from.

#01 –_**Motion**_-

She's in motion- memory-less, lost, and running into his arms before he can remind himself that she's not his to keep.

#17 **-Vision-**

Work with the dying and wounded has never left him much room for superstition, but dreaming every night that it's her blood on his hands undoes him like no vision would.

#07 _**-One-**_

If it hadn't been for her that night, asking that one broken question, "What did I tell you about me?", he might have managed to walk away from Smallville forever.

#12 _**– Wait-**_

She sees that strangeness in him, and apologizes (she should have known he'd be tired after another late shift) and tells him she'll wait on the couch until he's slept.

44 _**– Wall-**_

In his room, he backs himself into the wall and prays that he'll be able to hold it back; but suddenly there's only black.

#22 _**-Mad-**_

He shakes her awake like a man gone mad, and she asks him why he didn't say he was meteor infected.

#16 -_**Need- **_

She tells him she'll be there and wishes she could put into the words the ways she needs this as much as he does.

#06 _**– Gentle-**_

It's almost gentle with her, despite the fact that it's programmed to tear everything to bits; and she could almost laugh to imagine herself as the maiden in King Kong.

#39 _**– Torn-**_

She thinks that maybe she's truly mad when she doesn't feel torn at leaving behind an apartment, a fiancée and a life that doesn't feel like her own.

#38 – _**Wash**_

When she moves in they're still conflicted, but when they start taking turns on laundry wash (and she recognizes every unmatched set of his socks) she thinks they've started to become domestic.

#02-_** Cool**_

While some part of her shrinks back from the pull(its too much to be real), the cool-headed part of her acknowledges that they can only come so close to each other before they intersect.

#31 _**-Book-**_

It becomes a habit of hers to tell him all about the books he'd never gotten the chance to read as a boy; he always asks her how they end and sometimes she tells him, sometimes she just says that they chose their own endings and hopes against hope it is true.

#34 _**-Sing-**_

Chloe has only one memory of singing publicly, on a karaoke stage with Lois ('Your Cheating Heart' at the top of her voice, visualizing Clark, kicking the habit), and this second time its Davis and Sinatra, he _hates_ Sinatra and she finds herself mouthing along with the words.

#35 -_**Sudden**_-

There is no sudden shift between them; just a look, her hand open against his and a slow trembling kiss that becomes much, much more.

#32 -_**Eye-**_

Chloe's not afraid of the chaos, where everything around them is twisting and churning because for this moment they are that one still place at the center of it all.

#10 _**– Learn-**_

She learns more than she could have in a secret scoop from what he says and doesn't say, that night.

#18 _**-Attention-**_

She paid attention to every word, so later she asks him exactly how many of these fantasies he's had about her; and they get to every single one.

#49 _**-Hunger-**_

There's always a strange intense feeling in him when they are like this (a hunger for something deep within her that no one else sees) that he thinks it should frighten her, but then she smiles or teases him and it eases.

_#30__** – Ghost-**_

When they ghost into Metropolis, they are surprised to find themselves face to face with Clark and a bunch of clandestine superheroes known as the JLA.

#48 - _**Precious-**_

When they join the team there's tension, because Chloe is the one thing Davis (whatever that thing is inside him) can't live without, and there's no doubt that if it was her or the entire world, it would chose her.

#40 _**–History-**_

Despite the fact that she loves the parts of him that are nothing at all like Clark, he can't help the feeling that there's a normalcy to their history that he can never touch.

#08 –_** Thousand-**_

The first time she heals him during the change; it feels like she's dying a thousand deaths over and over again.

#42 _**– Bother**_

When Oliver complains about never getting an unbothered night of sleep when they hit the road as a team, Chloe doesn't remember them being _that_ loud.

#13 -_**Change**_-

"I've changed, Davis", she says, and she wants to laugh and cry because the Chloe she thought she was and the one she really was are merging until she doesn't know who _they_ are anymore.

#36 –_**Stop**_-

He doesn't ever say 'It's fine' or fill her thoughts with empty promises, but that he'll get to know her as she is now, and she stops.

#15 _**– Hold-**_

True to his word, he does, and eventually she learns that he's the one thing that holds both parts of her together.

#45 -_**Naked-**_

The change always leaves him like this (despite Lois's jokes that Davis helping out in his natural state after missions would be a public service) something about Chloe feels oddly maternal, like she wants to shield him from the world.

#43 -_**God**_-

Unlike Clark, there will be no deification for him- in missions he is the battering ram (always with her to hold him back), and because of what he was created to be, there will always be those who think the earth would be better with *it* gone.

#19 -_**Soul-**_

He doesn't really think there will be an afterlife for what he is (a human shell bred with deadly bits of genetic matter); but he knows that while she lives he has a soul.

#23 _**-Child-**_

Conception is impossible for both of them (her healing factor automatically neutralizes any external threat and he never wants to pass on the coding of *it* in his DNA to anyone else) but she still longs to see her own child looking back at her with his eyes.

#25 _**–Shadow-**_

The invasion of Gog falls over earth like a shadow (effectively gaining mass control of humanity) until only their small team- Clark, Oliver and his League, she and *the one who was meant to be the ultimate destroyer* are standing in its way.

#04 - _**Last**_

They make their last stand trapped in Metropolis-Clark crumples with the Kryptonite, Chloe when the mind probes start, and Davis loses it when he sees her eyes go blank.

#21 -_**Fool-**_

_Only a fool would not see what a deal I'm offering_, in Gog's words, _this mortal life of yours or the world_, and he (thinks of the many ways the creature has of ripping part her memories and her mind along the tears that have already been made), and he hears _your humanity or the one chance she has to live._

#26 -_**Goodbye**_-

She's slumped over a semi-conscious Clark and (he's not jealous, he knows _her_) all he can think is that he'll never get the chance to say goodbye.

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_A spirit that urges me restlessly onward_

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#33 – _**Never-**_

She'd never imagined that it would turn out like this, with his face plastered over the papers, headlines on the creature that saved Earth from Gog, as if he had been a symbol and not a man.

#20 –_**Picture-**_

She hates seeing the sensationalistic descriptions, wants to rip the papers to shreds every time, but she never does because she sees her last picture of him staring out at her.

#24 - _**Now**_

Now, Metropolis is whole, the little gaps in her memories are healing over and (*it* in Davis) has been transported to a time before his sentience, before he ever knew her and she can't let herself believe that it means they never existed at all.

#09 _**- King-**_

After he's gone she starts to think of Clark as the king in a chess game, always protected, the last to fall; and she can't help hating him a little more each day.

#46_**-Drive-**_

She finds herself following leads again, reading any sketchy mentions of parallel times and looking for dangerous bits of alien technology buried deep within her memories.

#37-_**Time**_-

Time passes between the next day and the next, and Kal-El worries that she lives alone with the hope and the timelines she creates on the walls.

#41 _**–Power-**_

She hacks her way into the compound, finds (Gog's right hand lieutenant) in a cell, and even without Braniac's mind twisting power, she thinks that if it wasn't for that tiny piece of rock, she would have no problem pulling all the memories from his mind.

#14 -_**Command-**_

She could be throwing herself into a trap, a broken time continuum, to a place she can never return from, but as she speaks her command into the last bit of Gog's time traveling device, she's sure.

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_A dreaming that haunts me, awake and asleep._

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#11_**– Blur-**_

Everything blurs when she opens her eyes to smoke and chaos, but when he tells her his name is Davis Bloom, inexplicably, it steadies again.

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_**Endnotes:**_ (The poem was Out Of the Ocean Depths, Louis L'Amour.) If the plot confuses you and you don't like ambiguity, feel free to speak up with questions/confusions and quibbles/requests for clarification. I will answer. It's perfectly clear in my head, but I'm not the one reading.

(And I would really love it if you tell me what you think works, and what doesn't. or maybe just pick one of them that you liked and one you didn't. Or write 'update your other thing, slacker.' :P )


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